


Spicier Ginger

by tiamatv



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Castiel Learns to be Human (Supernatural), Cooking, Domesticity in the Men of Letters Bunker (Supernatural), Kevin Tran Lives, M/M, Season/Series 09, Winchester Family Fluff (Supernatural)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:15:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24497785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiamatv/pseuds/tiamatv
Summary: Kevin held out a flat piece of dough and spooned in a teaspoon of pork mixture. “You can’t put too much in them or leave any air bubbles inside," he explained, folding up the dumpling. "‘Cause they’ll explode.”“So kind of like packing shotgun shells,” Dean joked.“Uh, yeah. Sure, Dean,” Kevin agreed, very dubiously. “Sure.”
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 38
Kudos: 208





	Spicier Ginger

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aiyah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aiyah/gifts).



> This little fic is, without a doubt, 100% [shen's](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orthokinesis/pseuds/orthokinesis) doing. For which I am very grateful, because I really needed something warm and fluffy today. (So yes, this is unbetaed.)
> 
> We're pretending that the boyos booted out the parasitic angel, Cas is settling in, and Kevin remains rather done with them all.

It came as a surprise to _absolutely no-one_ that Sam’s big brother liked to eat. Dean knew how and where to take his pleasures, how to _enjoy_ them, and Sam had always envied that about him, a little. It didn’t mean that Dean didn’t get lost in his head—yes, Sam knew that happened no matter how often Dean tried to pretend that he could lose himself in the job and nothing but the job. But Dean honestly _was_ better than Sam at staying in the moment when the moment was good. If that was a pretty girl? Fine. If that was a cherry pie with whipped cream? Even better.

The fact that Dean nested _hard_ when they hit the bunker? No shock to anyone.

The fact that Dean, though, immediately took over the kitchen and started _cooking_?

Yeah, Sam hadn’t actually seen that one coming. Everyone knew that Dean took his pleasures where he could get them, and that normally meant quick and easy. With how they lived, it had to be. He might drive four hours out of their way for a diner pie, but there was no world in which Dean was ever going to sit down to a long restaurant dinner.

Dean was a hunter in a world where there was no hibernation. Dean was motion, Dean was _momentum_. Sometimes it made Sam a little sick to think about it, but he was still a little guiltily surprised that his big brother hadn’t sank in that year he’d settled away from hunting with Lisa and Ben.

(In a way, Sam thought, maybe Dean had.)

Sam had kind of figured their fridge—because they had a _fridge_ now, and a freezer—was going to become the repository for about a hundred types of takeout—orange chicken, half-eaten burgers, spaghetti, and now and again a vegetable if Sam could sneak it into the crisper.

He had _not_ anticipated slow-cooked pot roast that went to pieces in his mouth, or watching the bubbles come up in homemade buttermilk pancakes.

So now Dean, who had once made _so much fun_ of Sam for enjoying farmers’ markets, had a spice cabinet, with a neat little spice rack in it that he’d made himself. They had cheesecloth—confusingly, not used for cheese—and roasting pans and baking pans and a cast iron skillet. Sam had once caught Dean looking at KitchenAid stand mixers on his laptop before he slammed it closed like Sam had caught him looking at porn.

(Actually, no, he didn’t generally bother closing his laptop when Sam caught him looking at porn.)

Kevin had come as just as much of a surprise. It was true, the kid had lived on his own, _survived_ on his own, in a truly remarkable fashion considering where he’d come from. Sam didn’t think anyone gave Kevin enough credit for how hard and how high he’d bounced, after his initial tumble into this insane life that they all lived. Dean certainly didn’t (what was with the “there’s no way out” speeches, _really, Dean?!_ ) and Cas had no possible way to know better. Nor, until recently, would he have cared.

The fact remained, though, that the first time Sam heard cooking sounds and went into the kitchen to find _Kevin_ standing at the stove rather than Dean, he blinked in surprise. Their prophet was vigorously stirring a pot of something that smelled savory and rich and _delicious_ on the stove.

(It occurred to Sam for a heartbeat that this could be some kind of a spell, since Kevin looked like he was stirring hard enough that a whirlpool was forming in the cooking pot. Then Kevin _tasted_ it, so… hopefully not.)

Kevin didn’t turn around when he spoke up. “Egg drop soup.” He reached over to another bowl on the countertop and started pouring the contents in a thin yellow stream into the swirling, chicken-and-spice-smelling mixture on the stove. “Want some?”

This time, Sam stared. “ _We_ had to teach you how to separate whites and colors,” he noted, slowly. He thought it was pretty lucky that Kevin hadn’t gone on the run wearing anything red, because a slender Asian teenager dressed in grimy greys was a lot less noticeable than a slender Asian teenager in all shades of motley pink would’ve been. Kevin hadn’t known how to do his own _laundry_ properly, how was it he knew how to cook?

Again, a shrug. “I didn’t have any sisters.”

Sam, who also had no sisters, still knew better than to touch that statement with a shotgun in one hand and an angel blade in the other.

He halfway expected Dean to get kind of territorial about the whole thing, especially with how he was about his bedroom. But he and Kevin seemed to have bonded over it… except _bonded_ wasn’t quite the right word, Sam didn’t think. They almost never seemed to use the space at the same time. Dean still was the one who made the majority of the meals when they were in the bunker. (Sam hated to admit it: nothing Dean made had any nutritional value but it all tasted _really good._ )

But every so often the plates being put on the wooden trench table in the kitchen were definitely _not_ out of the Middle America Cookbook, and no-one said anything about it.

(Cas _loved_ Chinese food. Huh. Considering that Castiel, former-angel-of-the-Lord, otherwise had the palate of a five-year-old and would eat peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches until he gave himself scurvy, that one had been a bit unexpected, too.)

It was a little before five in the afternoon when Sam jerked himself awake, almost knocking his laptop off the long wooden table before he snagged it with the crook of his elbow, heart racing. Ever since they’d driven out whoever the parasitic angel had been he felt _better,_ but he still felt more tired than he should most of the time.

It wasn’t happening as often, but Sam still sometimes fell asleep whenever he sat down for too long. When it happened, Dean didn’t wake him up by dropping something by his head anymore, the way he would have before (and with what Dean had done, Sam didn’t think anyone would have blamed him if Dean _had_ tried that sort of crap and Sam had ‘accidentally’ woken up swinging.) Cas sometimes draped a blanket over his shoulders, though, and Kevin—or at least Sam assumed it was Kevin—left tea by his head. Far enough that Sam wouldn’t knock it over if he woke up with a start, after the first time.

They were all pretending he was just fine. Sam was fine, this was fine. Why wouldn’t it be just fine? Winchesters, one and all.

He pulled himself out of the chair and grimaced as he pressed his fist into his lower back, combing his hair back from his face with his other hand. No more sleeping in the Vault’s chairs, though. There was a soft susurration of voices and some clanking from the kitchen. Sam considered just going to his room and going back to sleep, but honestly, a glass of something to hydrate him would probably be a good idea first.

However, the kitchen was as full as he’d ever seen it. It was a _big_ kitchen—or at least it was as far as Sam recognized kitchens—but with two tall men and a skinny prophet all gathered the cooking section, it seemed full: Cas at the center island, Dean fishing around in the fridge with a cutting board and kitchen knife balanced with precarious carelessness on one arm, and Kevin leaning against the stove with a deep metal bowl cradled in his arms like a baby.

“Hey, Sam,” Kevin chirped, stirring vigorously. “Did you have a good rest?”

“Sure. Um,” Sam managed, looking around. “Is something happening?”

“We are assembling _jiǔcài jiǎozi_ ,” Cas told him, with a great deal of steady confidence. He was down to one of the long-sleeved t-shirts he’d decided he favored rather than having to deal with a button-down—Cas hated ironing. His sleeves were rolled surprisingly neatly all the way up to his elbows, baring his forearms. However, the way he had just two fingers prodding gingerly into the bowl in front of him made him look like he was trying to hunt-and-peck, not mix.

(Shockingly? Cas _didn’t_ hunt-and-peck on a keyboard. He’d mastered ten-finger QWERTY with a speed and dexterity that had made Dean leave the room red-faced. Sam thought Dean probably _should_ be embarrassed, since even after all these years Dean still had to look down at his hands to type. However, Sam also thought that was probably not the reason for his big brother’s flushed cheeks.)

“Yeah, that thing he said,” Dean noted, very dry, but with that ‘ _dammit, Cas, stop being freaking cute’_ little deepening of the lines around his eyes. He carried over his cutting board and knife and a bundle of long green stems and plonked them to the countertop next to Cas. “Alright, seriously, are you mixing dough or doing data entry over there, Mozart?”

“That’s a really mixed metaphor,” Kevin announced. “Also, Chopin would be more appropriate.”

“Kevin, Dean is carrying a knife,” Cas answered, poking into the mixing bowl again with his pointer fingers, apropos of nothing. Except, actually, very apropos, considering Dean.

Kevin shut up and went back to stirring.

But Dean laughed. “What’re you _doing,_ buddy?” he nudged Cas with his hip. Cas didn’t budge, so for a long moment that seemed to leave Dean leaning all the way against his side. “C’mon, Cas, Jesus is going to rise from the dead again before you’re finished with that.”

Cas turned his head, just a little, and fixed Dean—entirely too close, in Sam’s opinion—with that patented, confused guileless stare. “’Again?’” he tipped his head to the side, lips pursing with curiosity. “What do you mean? He never rose from the dead in the first place.”

All activity in the kitchen stopped.

“Wow, okay,” Kevin managed. He clutched his metal mixing bowl to his stomach with both arms, the wooden spoon sticking vertically out of the middle of it like the stick of a lopsided lollipop. “So much just happened right there.”

Cas frowned. “I thought it was some time ago, at least as we humans reckon it.” He flicked his chin in the direction of Kevin’s mixing bowl. Teaching him not to point with his fingers had been easy, but Sam wasn’t sure where he’d picked up the habit of pointing with his lips and his face instead. “Kevin, isn’t doing that considered bad luck?”

Yeah, Cas still said ‘we humans’ the way other people said ‘the truth is out there,’ though.

“You realize I’m the only one of the four of us here who was actually raised with _normal_ superstitions,” Kevin muttered, flicking the spoon hard until it fell back over rather than sticking straight up, but he lowered the bowl and started stirring again.

“ _So_ , other than overturning the central tenet of Christian dogma, what’re we doing?” Sam finally asked.

“Well, the apostate over here is chopping garlic chives,” Dean reached over and swept Cas’s mixing bowl away from him, and pushed the big kitchen knife and the chopping board covered with long, slender green stalks in front of him instead, “since I guess we’re not waiting for the zombie thing after all.”

Sam exchanged a glance with Kevin. Kevin rolled his eyes a little, but at least the color was coming back into his cheeks. Dean had always been pretty touchy feely to begin with— _yes, Dean, you can deny it all you want, but we all know who always gets offered hugs and backslaps first_. But for someone who’d complained so much about Cas and personal space back in the day, Dean had gotten _very_ handsy since Cas had exchanged his trench coat for jeans and a hoodie.

“We’re making pork and chive dumplings,” Kevin proclaimed, before pointing the spoon accusingly at Castiel. Something pink plopped off it and onto the floor. “And can I say it still pisses me off that he pronounces _jiǔcài jiǎozi_ better than I do?”

Cas blinked innocently at him. “Thank you, Kevin,” he answered, gravely, then turned towards the chopping board. Whatever angelic ability Cas had once had with a blade had clearly translated well, because he started dissecting the long green chives much more smoothly than he’d been poking at the dough ball. Or at least Dean thought so, because he wasn’t moving from his position with his right arm brushing Cas’s left, close enough that their elbows bumped and tangled.

Though, well, that might have to do more with Dean and Cas than any confidence Dean had about Cas’s knife skills. Sam compressed down his sigh.

“And clean up after your own damned self, Kev,” Dean pointed with a toe of his boot at the pink blob on the floor, both hands working in the bowl of dough before he turned it out on the countertop and started kneading with long rolls of his hands, dusted almost to the elbow with flour. He completely ignored the knife flashing gracefully less than six inches from his forearms. “I don’t want salmonella shit in my kitchen.”

Castiel opened his mouth.

“ _No_.” Kevin and Dean both said it in unison.

Sam had no idea what Cas had been about to say, but he was still sure that stopping him was the right idea.

“Um.” Sam looked around at them—his family, he knew; he’d known that for awhile, but looking at them now, this was a _realization_. “Can I help?”

“Nah.” Dean held out his hand to the right. Cas, wordlessly, passed him the knife he’d been using. Sam blinked. “You go get some shut-eye, Sammy, we got this, I’ll wake you up for dinner.”

“No, wait!” Kevin threw out a hand like he thought he could bar Sam from the door from across the kitchen. “He can help fill, it takes forever. Yeah, I’ll take those now, Cas,” he turned to their former angel, who, relieved of his knife, had walked up to stand in front of him and was waiting patiently with a fragrant chopping board covered with tiny green bits.

“I will start washing,” Cas told him, seriously, as he took back the chopping board. On his way towards the sink, he pulled down some sort of a long rolling pin and an industrial-sized baking tray, and left them on the center island countertop next to Dean’s elbow. Then he narrowed his eyes and swiped his thumb across a streak of flour just shy of Dean’s scruff. Dean grunted and didn’t look up as he dumped little balls of dough onto the tray.

Sam caught Kevin’s eye again.

“Yeah,” Kevin agreed, looking resigned—which was how Kevin looked a lot of the time, to be honest, but Sam was pretty sure it wasn’t always tinged with that mixture of fond amusement and just being _so done_. It was the first time in a long time, Sam thought, that he’d seen Kevin actually looking his age. “They’re always like this in the kitchen.”

“What?” Dean asked. This time he looked up. Cas took the knife and the now-empty mixing bowl from him, their hands and arms brushing casually, and walked back to the sink. “Who’s what?”

Kevin started paying intense attention to his bowl. He was mixing its contents with his hand, now. “Nothing, Dean.”

Cas was humming to himself as he washed dishes. Sam was pretty sure it was Asia.

Huh.

They all sat down at the little dining table in the corner, a floury stack of little flattened dough circles in the middle, next to a mixing bowl the size of Sam’s head filled with something pink. It already smelled good, gingery and salty and spicy even uncooked. There was something darker to it that tickled at the back of his throat. Sam inhaled, frowning. “What’s in that?”

“Normal stuff. Pepper, ginger, garlic chives, soy sauce. Little Chinese sherry. Sesame oil,” Kevin explained. “Mom’s secret ingredient. Okay, so… like this.” He picked up one of the flat pieces of dough and put it into his palm, and added in a teaspoon of pork mixture. It folded into a delicate half-moon when he closed his fingers, and he rubbed at the pocket and pinched the edges neatly shut with the fingers of his other hand. “You can’t put too much in them or leave any air bubbles inside, though, ‘cause they’ll explode.”

“So kind of like packing shotgun shells,” Dean joked.

“Uh, yeah. Sure, Dean,” Kevin agreed, _very_ dubiously. “Sure.”

Sam didn’t know if it was because his hands were so much _bigger_ than Kevin’s, though, because the first time he tried to fold one of the little dough circles over, pork spilled out of the corners and onto his palms. He grimaced and poked it back in, but now it was obvious what Kevin had meant about not putting too much in there, because he couldn’t get the dough to pinch closed with the layer of pork at the edges. He scraped some out and managed to crimp the little dough circle shut, but there was something suspiciously sticky about it and he didn’t think he should be able to see green specks of chive on the outside, not the inside.

Okay. Take two.

Alright, this one actually sealed shut, but it looked like one of those old-fashioned twist candies: a tiny little blob with a big tuft of dough sticking out the top. Nope.

The third one _almost_ wanted to put itself together, and Sam was pretty sure he had it—he’d looked beside him and Kevin seemed like he was stretching the dough over a little bit, and that seemed to work—until the dough split on the _bottom_ , leaving pork on his hands again.

Samuel Winchester had gotten himself admitted to Stanford despite not having taken a single AP class or spent more than a consecutive year in a single school at basically any point in his life. It had taken him less than twenty-four hours to memorize a Latin exorcism, and now he could, quite literally, extrapolate any phrase in it backwards _and_ forwards as necessary. He still remembered portions of spells in languages he didn’t understand, and had performed more complex rituals than most of the world was aware existed. Sam was, he was pretty sure, widely assumed to be the best-read hunter alive in the continental United States today.

He was being defeated by pork dumplings. This was _embarrassing_.

Sam pinched the dumpling’s soggy bottom back shut with an indignant huff and dumped it in front of him before looking back up. Cas had a row of half a dozen lined up before him, regimented like little soldiers. The first ones were a little messy, so that made Sam feel a little better. But the ones after weren’t, and each one looked _exactly_ the same size. Kevin had a few more than that—his were more round, but he’d done something to the edges so that they were scalloped prettily where they rose over the rounded surface.

Dean had enough scattered on the baking tray in front of him to make up nearly as much as everyone else’s put together.

Sam blinked at the three sad, lopsided little dough pockets in front of him, the meat drippings turning the flour from the dough into a pink sticky coating of paste on his hands, then stared at the neat little pouches sitting in front of his big brother. Dean’s hands had a dusting of flour on them, but how were his hands not a gummy mess the way Sam’s were?

“Wow,” he noted. It was weird to be impressed—God only knew that Dean did the impossible daily and twice on Sundays—but Sam… sort of was. “You’re really good at this.”

“He really is,” Kevin muttered, reaching into the middle to gather up another spoonful of filling, and plopping it into the little floured circle on his palm. “It’s annoying.”

Dean smirked and shot finger guns at them all.

Sam protested when Dean swept his misshapen examples onto the same tray as everyone else’s, though. “You’re not going to cook those too, are you?”

“Why not?” Dean shrugged, and punched him on the shoulder—with a hand that left a flour fist on Sam’s flannel but was otherwise still _not messy,_ dammit. Cas and Kevin were already standing at the stove with a giant pot of water, conferring about something quietly. “You made ‘em, why shouldn’t they go in the pot like everyone else’s?”

“You heard Kevin. They might explode!”

“Most everything we deal with might explode, Sammy.”

Sam scowled at him. “That,” he noted, “does not make it okay.”

Dean laughed, and carried off the tray like the asshole big brother that he was anyway. Castiel, as he passed, handed him a slotted spoon.

Sam found a set of a dozen metal chopsticks while he was rummaging for serving options, to Kevin’s delight. (Or at least Sam thought they were supposed to be metal chopsticks. There was a nonzero possibility they were some kind of weapon. Nonetheless, they looked like chopsticks, so he was sticking with that.) Kevin clacked his pair playfully at Cas’s nose with a chirp of “En garde!” and Cas didn’t flinch. He did, though, accidentally go cross-eyed to look at them.

“Ouch.” He pressed the heel of his palm to his eyes. “I don’t like that. That was uncomfortable.”

“What number is that, now?” Dean asked, bumping him with a shoulder. The large metal plate he was balancing on his other hand like a bizarre flanneled maître-d’ held _way_ too many cooked dumplings for even four grown men.

“Number?” Sam asked.

“Human learning experiences,” Cas answered, still rubbing his eyes. “Two hundred eighty… six?” he squinted blue from over his thumbs, surprisingly smitey. “Oh. I think I’ve lost count.”

“Yeah, see, that’s when you know you’re _really_ human. Okay, yeah, stop that,” Dean took Cas by the wrist, lowering his hand from his face back down to his side. Cas turned that unearthly gaze on him. Dean crooked a smile. “Come eat.”

Sam’s little pockets had definitely exploded in the pot. (“Eh.” Dean shrugged. “Whatever. It’ll make the others taste better. Best kind of explosion possible, really.”)

But the rest of the dumplings were _delicious_.

“ _Jiǔcài jiǎozi?”_ tried Sam, carefully, for the third time.

“Hey!” Kevin looked impressed. “Yeah. That’s pretty good!”

“Pork and chive dumplings,” Castiel agreed, peacefully. He reached out for another one and dipped a corner delicately in vinegared soy sauce. (Even fallen angels could, it seemed, use chopsticks.)

It probably wasn’t too much food, it turned out. They were mouth-coatingly fatty and moist, sharp with ginger and sherry and bitten through with vinegar. Kevin said something dreamily about rice. Cas brightened. (He really had a thing for fried rice, even though Sam still thought fermented fish bits should be nowhere near food at all.) Kevin mocked Dean for using a fork—Dean proved that at short range, his aim was just as good with a dumpling as anything else.

Sam had watched Dean grinning in a hundred pie-filled diners and a thousand momentum-bright moments. And if Sam thought his big brother’s smile as he stuffed another dumpling into his mouth and then laughed with his mouth disgustingly open was happier than he thought he’d ever seen him? Well. He was enough of a little brother to notice, and enough of a man to not say anything.

“What’s up, Sammy?” And Dean was enough of a big brother that the look that he was giving Sam was definitely suspicious.

“Nah. Nothing,” Sam answered, cheerfully, and ignored the dwindling pile in the middle to grab a dumpling off Dean’s plate with a swipe of his chopsticks. Dean squawked. “Everything’s fine.”

For the first time in a very, very long time, Sam meant it.

~fin~

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this comes from 姜是老的辣—the older ginger gets, the spicier it is. (Wisdom comes with age.)
> 
> Thank you for reading—I hope you enjoyed it!


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